5 Unfulfilled Anime That Left Us a Little Empty Inside

There’s nothing worse than an anime you love abruptly ending. Here are some of the most frustrating unfulfilled anime ever.

Everyone likes a good story with a beginning, middle and an end. So the most tragic thing that can happen to a story is for it to prematurely end. This is especially annoying when the story in question is serial, and ends in the middle of an arc, with no closure, or on a cliffhanger from which it will never dislodge. Or, if it just ends without explaining itself.

Here are five examples of anime that left us unfulfilled and desperately in need of closure.

1 – World Trigger

Based on a well liked manga of the same name, this anime began airing on TV Asahi in October 2014, and ended abruptly in April 2016. The circumstances of this sudden end were not well explained in the Anglosphere at the time. The sole explanation being that TV Asahi had replaced their entire Anime block with a ‘Sports Programme’.

I later found out that they had reached the latest chapter of the manga at the time. And that one of the artists nearly died, so the show had to be put on hiatus.

Mikumo after slicing an arm off a Marmod

This of course is forgivable, but what really burns my biscuits is that this was not adequately explained at the time. Also that since then there has been no attempt to renew the show in any form, despite the manga continuing on like clockwork.

Nobody is saying that they need to continue producing one episode a week ad-infinitum, but they could at least do it in 12 episode batches. At the very least I would appreciate a feature length OVA that finishes the arc they were on when the show ended.

2 – Tiger Mask W

Ok, somebody needs to check TV Asahi HQ for lead pipes. This is now their second anime to be cancelled mid-arc with no explanation. Tiger Mask W is a continuation of the original Tiger Mask anime from ’69-’71, airing from October 2016 to July 2017.

Again, the Anglosphere is woefully lacking in explanations for this decision, so maybe next year we’ll get an answer, but that doesn’t mean I can forgive the way they’ve handled this TWICE NOW! The main arc of the anime was 36 episodes long, bleeding into episode 37 as the second arc was established, and ending on episode 38, just as it was getting good.

If they were going to cancel it they really should have done it at the end of the first arc, not two episodes into the second.

Springer in the ropes for leverage

Perhaps the reasoning was that they didn’t expect the next section to be popular. The arc featuring ‘Spring Tiger’ or ‘Springer’ as she was known, would have been an exploration of women’s wrestling in Japan. Just as the first one had been about men’s wrestling.

Is this sexism? Possibly, but I don’t even like wrestling and I loved the first section. I at least would have liked them to give it a chance. Lead plumbing, I swear to God…

3 – School Rumble

Close to my heart, this was among the first anime I watched, and one that really got me into otaku culture. It aired intermittently from October 2004 to September 2006.

Following a set of high school romances, a cast of relatable characters, and a sentimental self-meta buried under the kind of hijinks that make sense when you’re a teenager, this show really hit home with ‘high school Jono’.

Group photo at the beach

So you can imagine my pain when I learned that there was to be no third and final season. Instead they made a two-episode OVA skipping right to the end of the story. This sad attempt at closure was better than nothing, I guess. But I am still disappointed that the studio got lazy and didn’t bother to do a proper one, even though one had been planned.

Every time I’m tempted to re-watch School Rumble I remember this. I then have to ask myself if I want to go through that again.

4 – Highschool Of The Dead

Evel Knievel would be proud

A tongue-in-cheek ecchi manga, given an anime adaptation from July to September 2010. This one at least completed a whole arc. But it felt so rushed at the end that it lost alot of its’ charm. Almost as if the studio knew they were under a microscope already. This was primarily due to lacklustre reviews and political pressures relating to the level of sexuality in its’ contents. Some were quick to call it simplistic, as if that’s a bad thing for a Zombie story. And a fair few complained that it was far to sexual for TV. Despite this the manga continued to be produced and sold until the author’s death recently in March 2017.

5: The World God Only Knows

Looking smug for now, wait till Season 3…

Katsuragi Keima is an expert in exactly one field: Dating Sims. This is already pretty flimsy as a premise, but somehow within the universe it works. He is known on the internet as the ‘capture god’ for his skills, and helping others with these games. As a result he is accidentally roped into helping a demon find and clean up escaped demons who’ve infiltrated society in the hearts of young ladies.

While this all smells of standard fare for an anime involving both ecchi culture and demons, it eventually becomes rather grim. By the end of three seasons, his life has been turned on its head. And he can’t even tell any more what’s real and what’s part of the job. The one thing he used to be an expert in no longer amuses him. His skill for seducing actual women has become more a burden than anything else. And he’s still bound by contract to keep finding escapees.

At the end of the third and final season, he’s seduced many girls, some more than once. They all forget him as soon as the demons are removed, except the one girl who actually loved him. She gets to go on living, knowing exactly who her first love is. He can’t even bring himself to play dating sims any more, and there is no end in sight. Presumably he goes on, forever seducing women who immediately forget him.